Trolley Tuesday 11/25/21 - Seattle Municipal Electric Railway... Revisited

Welcome, dear riders to our Twice-Weekly Trolley History Thanksgiving Special! The special thing about it is it is not a special at all, rather just the next planned episode in our series of November (creeping into December) rewrites! As we're technically still in the Pacific Northwest, we turn our attention from the stumpy, coffee-addicted hipsterdom of Portland, Oregon, to look at another stumpy, coffee-addicted hipsterdom in the form of Seattle, Washington! Following in the footsteps of San Francisco's transit revolution, Seattle's 231 miles of electric street railways over 26 lines made up one of the largest municipal transit systems in the wake of the original "Muni". However, unlike San Francisco, Seattle had a hard time making theirs work, and what was once a promising future of complete public control and service became a black hole that could only end in bus operation. On today's Trolley Thursday, let's revisit the Seattle Municipal Street Railway and see what made the Emerald City shine!

  

All's Good with Osgood

The first electric streetcar in Seattle, run on March 30, 1889.
Frank Osgood is somewhere in this photo.
(Historylink)

Frank H, Osgood, trolley tycoon.
(History of King County)

Horsecars began running in Seattle on September 23rd, 1884, when the "2nd Avenue Line" in downtown Seattle was established by entrepreneur and real estate venture capitalist Frank Osgood (1852-1934). Osgood was the first man to run a streetcar in Seattle, but not the first to propose one; an earlier businessman named Irving Ballard obtained a franchise to run the 1st Avenue line in 1879, but nothing ever came of it. At this time, Seattle streets were about as muddy and unpaved as any other booming city and horses would have a hard time navigating the thick mire, as well as people trying to walk down the street. For a nickel, people could shed the mud from their boots and ride aboard smooth steel rails, which made the 2nd Avenue Line an instant hit. Spurred on by the horsecars' success, Osgood was able to invest enough capital to electrify the horsecars and gave Seattle its first electrified streetcar line by March 30, 1889.

A Seattle Consolidated Street Railway electric car by
 the Hammond Car Company of San Francisco, CA.
(Jessica Livingston Real Estate)

As Osgood's horsecars took off in popularity and financial success, other local businessmen and real estate entrepreneurs began establishing their own streetcar lines with varying power systems. In 1887, the first cable car lines in Seattle were established along Yesler Way and Jackson Street, between Pioneer Square and Leschi Park, by J.M. Thompson and Fred Sander (who later built the Puget Sound Electric Railway, or PSER). The cable car was built to the same standard as the California Street Cable Car line in San Francisco, and even included the ever-iconic double-ended car designs. Other prominent railroads included David Denny's University District line, Guy Phinney's Woodland Park line, and John McGilvra's Madison Park line, promoting new streetcar suburbs and booming business centers. Even Irving Ballard, who failed to start his own trolley line, eventually established his own real estate venture in the form of "Ballard".

The Yesler Way cable car at 3rd Street and Yesler in 1940,
showing how the open "California Car" ends were not 
conducive to PNW weather.
(Seattle Municipal Archives)

By 1892, there were 48 miles of electrified streetcar track and 22 miles of cable railways. The most important avenues were the city's east-west streets like Yesler Way and Jackson Street, which linked Puget Bound long-haul steamers and ferries with local ferries on Lake Washington. A further connection with Seattle's Union Station on Jackson Street meant that the city had one of the nation's first intermodal transit systems in America (utilizing ferry, heavy rail, and light rail systems). And yet, despite this interconnection, each and every line was still owned and operated by a one-owner franchise. With twenty-two lines popping up between 1889 and 1893, there was some cause for concern among Seattleites as to how this venture could be practical. There were even anxieties that one line could charge more or even refuse to honor a transfer ticket from another railway, forcing passengers to pay more for separate tickets, or that a line with a particularly important franchise (like the aforementioned Yesler and Jackson cable cars) could artificially decrease service to induce a raised fare. 

A map of the Seattle Municipal Street Railway in its final years.
A larger, more legible version can be found here.
(SeattleCJ)

Furth of Fifth

Jacob Furth at his desk in Seattle, ca. 1900.
(Seattle Museum of Science and Industry)

Fortunately, or rather unfortunately, Seattle's citizens wouldn't bother themselves with multiple-company anxieties for too long, as by 1893, an interurban magnate named Jacob Furth (1840-1914) began buying up the twenty-two independent franchises for his Boston-headquartered employers, Stone & Webster, after they had gained ownership of Fred Sanders' eventually-unrelated Seattle Electric Railway (a local streetcar line). The purchasing was done very quietly, and would have almost gone unnoticed had the Seattle public not found out in 1900 that the city was giving Stone & Webster a 40-year franchise to operate the trolleys. Immediately, and given this was in the middle of the Gilded Age, citizens cried "Monopoly" and pointed the finger at Stone & Webster to get them to stand down and allow their independent companies to compete with each other. By this point, however, Stone & Webster had already purchased all twenty-two companies, and nothing much could be done about it. 

A single-ended West Seattle Cable Railway streetcar,
a precursor to the nation's first municipal street railway.
(Seattle Municipal Archives)

The twenty-two companies were then allowed by the city to consolidate under one company, the Seattle Electric Railway (SER), which fell under Stone & Webster's Puget Sound Power, Light & Traction, a holding company that also included the PSER. In response to the mass consolidation, the community of West Seattle decided that enough was enough and they were going to maintain their own municipal streetcar if the city wasn't going to do it. In 1902, the first municipal streetcar line in America officially began operation in West Seattle, but then in 1907, the line was annexed to Seattle due to West Seattle lacking the funds to keep the venture going. Other responses to the mass consolidation included a massive strike in March 1903 against the SER over proposed fare increases (one of many) and loss of faith in Stone & Webster as transit operators. 

An open summer car is seen at Wildwood Station in 1905, on the
Seattle and Renton Interurban Railway. At the time of its completion, the
twelve-mile line was said to be the longest interurban in the world.
(University of Washington)

By 1911, this rabbling had reached a fever pitch as the SER failed to purchase the Seattle-Renton Interurban Railway due to severe fare losses, and it seemed that was the final nail in the coffin for the SER to grow as a company. Over the next few years, Stone & Webster appealed to the city to raise its fares above a nickel with promises to repair its relationship with the citizens (who cited their aging equipment and erratic schedules against them), but to no avail. Jitney buses then began eating into Stone & Webster's coffers and the SER was losing money faster than the latest Silicon Valley startup. Caught in the middle of this financial hellhole, citizens began remembering what West Seattle tried just ten years ago and soon voted to establish the first proper municipal streetcar line in Seattle, the Municipal Street Railway (MSR) between Downtown and Ballard, in 1914. 

The Muni Meltdown, 80 Years Too Early

A very stone-faced Mayor Ole Hanson drives the first
municipal streetcar over the University Bridge, July 1, 1919.
(San Clemente Times)

Four years later, with the growing in popularity and ridership, Stone & Webster decided to cut their losses and controversially offered the SER to then-Mayor Ole Hanson (1874-1940) for the insane price of $15 million (or $262.5 million in 2020). Voters, eager to gain control of their streetcars, blindly agreed, but the city didn't really have $15 million to spend on the new railway. This meant that the MSR was crippled by an insane debt from the start, and the Washington State Supreme Court denied any subsidies to aid the system (for whatever reason, either because Stone & Webster sold the company to the city directly or they would not provide aid to a "monopoly" system). Despite this, Mayor Hanson and the citizens of Seattle hailed their purchase as a "triumph" and, on July 1, 1919, Hanson drove the first municipal streetcar over the University Bridge to ring in a new age of city-owned public transit. 

A Cal Cable-style car is spotted at Yesler and 2nd, crossing the 2nd Avenue line in 1903.
(Seattle Photographs)

A Seattle MSR fare token from 1919.
(Numista)

Three cable car lines and 231 miles over 26 streetcar lines were now under Seattle's command, along with 410 streetcars and 60 buses over 18 routes. Despite this impressive number and the widespread reach of the MSR, there was always that subsidy problem (or rather, lack of them) that kept welling up to the surface. Without subsidies, the only way for the MSR to run was through direct fare revenue, and since one of the caveats of the city's purchase was to cap the fares at a nickel, the MSR was losing more money than it was actually gaining to sustain itself. This is in comparison to San Francisco's Municipal Railway, which is funded by state subsidies and city taxes through its Public Utilities Commission. Seattle didn't have a municipal street railway in so much as they actually had a municipal street railway company, and run it like a company they did. 

Then-Mayor Bertha Knight Landes plays motorette as she
fiddles with the catch rope of Birney Car No. 179 in 1927.
(Seattle Times)

Over the next two mayors after Hanson, Bertha Knight Landes (1868-1943, the first female mayor of a city in 1926) and Frank Edwards (1874-1943) lost their reelection campaigns over failing to fix the Seattle MSR's problems and the city was further divided over how to recoup the losses incurred by the transit system. Between 1920 and 1936, no discernable information could be found at this time over how the MSR operated exactly, but it can be inferred that the system was running a patchwork of blinky services with very old equipment. By 1936, the MSR's operational deficits were $4 million dollars ($74 million in 2020) against a barely-catching-up farebox profit of $3.9 million (72 million in 2020), leading the MSR to have an operational deficit of one hundred thousand dollars a year! 

  

Notable Streetcars

A Stone and Webster "Turtleback" serving as a special sightseeing car.
(Unknown Author)

Despite knowing the exact number of streetcars that Seattle rostered, not much information is out there for me to accurately ascertain what types of streetcars they had. They had some of the more common types, like the early Brill converted horsecars and Birney Safety Cars, but others go quite unannounced or underreported. What is unique to the MSR's roster (and common throughout streetcar lines owned by Stone & Webster) was the "Turtleback" car, a class of 13-window, double-truck streetcar designed by Stone & Webster and contracted to the St. Louis Car Company in the 1890s. These were later supplanted by 12-window cars that resembled stubby Perley A. Thomas cars in New Orleans, featuring tall roofs and end windows. According to most contemporary accounts, the cars began as green but were later colored red and were known locally as "Red Cars", but this name was not as prevalent as in the Pacific Electric Railway in Los Angeles. Another interesting fact about the cars is that for a brief time, the trolleys ran on a double-wire system instead of a single-wire as is common with electric railways. Again, information is still currently scarce but welcomed all the same.

A 1901 Seattle Electric Railway car, showing off its high windowlines and shielded wheels.
(Seattle Municipal Archives)

A Brill Convertible streetcar in 1911, descending the ramp from Pioneer Square.
(Seattle Municipal Archives)

Terrible Trackless Thoroughfares

A Seattle bus to East Green Lake, 1937.
(Only in Your State)

Getting back to the troubles of the Seattle MSR, one of the biggest fears about the system going into the mid-1930s was the possibility of Seattle replacing all of its streetcars with buses. For Seattleites, this plan was met with the popular anxiety that any change to the already-dying streetcars could bring the city to a standstill (in an era of rising car ownership biting into street railway profits). John C. Beeler, an engineering firm head who was hired to solve the trolley problem in Seattle, offered a city plan (dubbed the "Beeler plan") that would gradually convert all 26 streetcar lines to buses in order from least-ridden to most ridden, ensuring no service interruptions or abrupt transitions. While this sounded like the best compromise on paper, then-mayor John Dore (1881-1938) put the plan to a vote on March 9, 1937, and it was soundly rejected by a significant chunk of citizens and labor groups. To further appease the crowd, Beeler was sacked following the vote.

A steel streetcar, unique in design to the Seattle MSR,
cruises along the "Thoroughfare of Death" in Renton, 1936.
(Seattle Municipal Archives)

However, preserving Seattle's streetcars for just a little bit longer may have just ensured their death just a little bit quicker. Following the failure of the Beeler Plan, all of the Seattle area's electric railways fell into a death spiral with the closure of many interurban and street lines (including the PSER). The Seattle, Renton & Southern interurban line, which was developed by Frank Osgood as Puget Sound's first interurban railway, closed in 1938 after the city council refused to both renew its franchise and allow the company to pave over a dangerous bit of track through downtown Renton's Rainier Avenue known as the "Thoroughfare of Death". The "thoroughfare of death" involved a stretch of double track flanked by thin, near-one-lane slabs of road, with zero curb separation between streetcars and cars. This led to pedestrians having to cross unpaved trolley tracks to walk across the street, and also led to many stuck cars on the tracks and crossing strikes. After the closure of the Renton Line, diesel buses through Stone & Webster's North Coast Lines (NCL, not that one) were brought in to replace the streetcars.

A demonstrator "trackless trolley" in front of the
North Seattle carbarn on March 4, 1937. One of the streetcars
is peering out with caution and worry.
(University of Washington Special Collections)

The next two years, 1939 and 1940, were spent in a continued freefall as Seattleites slowly accepted that their municipal trolley experiment had been a dismal failure. Following the shutdown of the Everett line in 1939, the cable cars on Yesler and Jackson were finally closed in 1940 and the Seattle MSR around this time rebranded itself as "Seattle Transit". With the city's debts rising over their continued streetcar operations, relief finally came in late 1940 through then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Under the Reconstruction Finance Company, a $10.2 million dollar loan ($189 million in 2020) was secured to enable Seattle to get its financial obligations in order. Under Mayor Arthur Langlie (1900-1966), Seattle paid off Stone & Webster's remaining mortgages under the MSR and implemented a modified version of the Beeler Plan to bustitute its trolley lines. This included retaining the trolley wires for new trolley buses, an option not considered before due to Beeler finding them "impractical". By the end of 1940, the city had filed an official petition with the state to discontinue trolley service and was shortly given approval soon after. Of the 26 streetcar lines, the last to run was the Seattle-Ballard line on April 13, 1941.

A woman is seen by the Ballard Bridge where a Seattle MSR streetcar is taking pause.
Notice the open, offset rear entrance.
(Westside Seattle)

The Modern Muni

One of the many Australian W-2 Class streetcars make
their way past the Seattle Aquarium on the George Benson
Waterfront Streetcar, 1990s.
(Market Street Railway)

Seattle spent the next forty years as a bus-only city, with expanded trolley-bus service on every steep hill between the Pike and Lake Washington while diesel buses took up most of the downtown brunt. Even the stellar ALWEG monorails for the 1962 Century 21 Exposition did nothing to change this. Seattle Transit continued on unchanged until 1973, when it was folded into the new King County Metro regional transit authority. However, the distinct lack of trolleys in the city didn't stop a dedicated group of enthusiasts led by Councilman George Benson to electrify a portion of Alaskan Way along the waterfront to create the famous "George Benson Waterfront Streetcar Line" in 1982. With streetcars in vogue again within Seattle, it took some time for the city to finally gain a new streetcar system through the Sound Transit "Link Light Rail" on August 22, 2003. The new interurban light rail now connected Seattle with SeaTac Airport, as well as largely running along the former route of the PSER by connecting Tacoma with Seattle by rail. 

Two new Link Light Rail trains, serving as Seattle's newest interurban system.
(Publicola)

Opening day of the South Union Lake Streetcar at McGraw Square,
the southern terminus, on December 12, 2007.
(Robert Scheuerman)

There is also, as of December 12, 2007, a new local streetcar in the form of the "South Lake Union Streetcar" (or SLUT if you're funny) that runs 1.3 miles between South Lake Union and Westlake in Downtown Seattle. The first new local streetcar in a while, and two years after the George Benson Streetcar ended operations, the SLUT and its companion line, the 2.5-mile First Hill Line from Pioneer Square to Capitol Hill, are just two of eventually many new streetcar lines to finally return Seattle into a transit powerhouse. Due to local politics, the two lines remain separated but plans are in motion to connect them for a major cross-town service. When asked about the SLUT's embarrassing name, Mayor Greg Nickels (1955-he's still alive) was quote as saying, "I don't care what you call it, as long as you ride it." As of 2016, the SLUT has taken over 760,000 people for a ride at its peak in 2012. Only time will tell if the connection with the First Hill Line will raise these numbers and return the Seattle Trolley to prominence.

Remnants and Preserved Stock

Seattle MSR No. 144 as "Pacific Electric Railway 144"
at the now-defunct Hollywood location of the 
Old Spaghetti Factory restaurant chain.
(Videos.WTXL.com)

Of the Seattle MSR's mighty fleet of 410 streetcars, only two exist. Both are incomplete Birney car bodies built in 1918 by the American Car Company of St. Louis, Missouri, and only one remains in Washington State. King County Metro currently owns the body of No. 210, a Birney that was originally preserved by the Puget Sound Railway Historical Association from 1988 to 1996. It is assumed that the car is still in storage at a King County Metro service facility. The other car, No. 144, was an earlier Birney car delivered in 1918 and worked until 1940. After its retirement, it seems to have disappeared before turning up at the Old Spaghetti Factory in Hollywood, California, where it was dressed as a Pacific Electric car. When the restaurant closed in 2007, the body was sold to a private owner in the area, where it allegedly remains to this day. Within Seattle, there is almost no trace of the streetcars apart from the new ones, and both Yesler Way and Jackson Street remain one-way streets, just like they were more than a century ago. When one looks at the Seattle Municipal Electric Railway in finality, one might say that while the city's heart was in the right place, the trolleys could not overcome the obstacles set before them. Such a shame.

When riding public transit, or going anywhere in public,
please be sure to wear your mask and demonstrate common
health and safety courtesy to others. We thank you.
(WDZ111 on Reddit)

  

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. My resources today included a HistoryLink article on the Seattle Municipal Electric Railway, "Transit: The Story of Public Transportation in the Puget Sound Region" by Jim Kershner, "The Street Railway Era in Seattle: A Chronicle of Six Decades" by Leslie Blanchard, the Seattle Municipal Street Railway Photograph Collection of the Orbis Cascade Archives, and the credits under each photo caption. The trolley gifs in our posts are made by myself and can be found under “Motorman Reymond’s Railroad Gif Carhouse”. On Tuesday, For now, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Until next time, ride safe!